Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Doug On Coventalism

This is an analysis of Doug Van Dorns assertion regarding
the definition of Covenants as seen in his book Covenant
theology, a Reformed Baptist Primer.
I promise you this blog post is more interesting than I just made it sound.

Necessary Personal Background Information

Let me begin by saying something about the view I had
regarding how the covenants all fit together before picking up this book: I
only accepted a covenant when the Bible explicitly stated it. Noah, Abraham, and
David, are in, Adam is out. This is because I took covenant to mean “Christ,” which is why the covenants in the old
testament have death or sacrifice in them, since they foreshadow the savior. Each covenant is designed to be a progressive
revelation about Jesus until we get to the New Testament whereupon the thing is
fully revealed. For example, Noah teaches us that God would send someone to
save the world from His wrath and put everything back together. Abraham teaches
us that Jesus would descend from him, a man who would bless the world. From David
we learn He will be a King. In short Old Testament=Christ Promised, New
Testament=Christ revealed.
But for this reason the covenant with creation mentioned in Jeremiah 33 never
sat well with me. I tried to shoehorn it into the covenant God made with Noah,
but that’s sort of an ugly fit and I was never happy with it, because it never
really worked. Think about it for a minute and you’ll see why.

As far as I can tell Dougs stance looks very much like the
older treatises on the matter (whether or not that’s your bag) with the only
difference being that his work is more accessible for the layman than say,
Hodge. Doug has done a great job in making this topic trivially easy to grasp, but
personally I’m a little disappointed that he’s stuck closely to the original
thinkers whom I find to be defective, or at least incomplete. Not that I blame him for that you understand, being
in a different stage, age, career, and circle of life than I do it’s only
natural. Nor does it bother me that he comes closer to historicity than I think
is wise. Lots of other good thinkers have. I readily admit that I get away with
blog posts like this because I’m independent, and find it exceedingly amusing when my pastor
calls my blogs the stupidest thing he’s ever read. A
man like Doug or Bob Gonzalez however doesn't have that luxury, he must necessarily stick closer to the
Authorized Opinion if they’re to be heard by their community. (Otherwise they’d
end up like me!)
Full disclosure though, I’m suspicious of my own view, since, as far as I know,
nobody holds it but me. I’m even more suspicious however of the even larger inconsistencies
I see in the historic models.

A Short Critique of the Text Leading up to the Assertion

Right away Doug defines covenant like the older thinkers do
[see kindle location 206] as: an oath of
fealty sworn between two unequal parties, often ushered in by blood. This is
different than a contract which is between equals. Often a covenant is best
understood by an ancient near east Suzeran making his vassal swear allegiance
to him, or giving things to his vassal regent.
“I find this… lacking.” I say to myself, “A contract is an agreement over things, a covenant is an agreement
between two people. Furthermore, for
as much as these theologians go on about blood, the covenant cut with Adam or
creation doesn’t feature blood in it. And for goodness sake, when will those
old canards about grants versus obligations die already? That’s a terrible fit
to the Biblical model, no matter how much Kingdom
Through Covenant pushes it. It leaves so much on the table and achieves very
little in terms of clarity.”

In another place however he contradicts that line of thought
by defining a covenant as: a formal
definition of relationship between two parties.
“Well that’s an improvement at any rate,” I think to myself. “Although it still
leaves the door open for bare assertions of God to be classified as Covenants,
which I’m not impressed with. It would mean for example, when Adam named the
animals he covenanted with them—a dubious proposition at best. It also seems to
make a mash of how works and grace get along, allowing some theologians to say
works are antithetical to grace, and others to say the existence of works are
gracious.”
To be fair Doug seems to realize the problem of this as well since he later
talks about the problems of categorizing the covenants [see Loc 783].

The book then takes a turn for the better when discussing
the objective and subjective dimensions of Christ’s work, then a turn for the
worse in falling back into the older thought patterns regarding Covenant of
Redemption. And then—an almost throwaway line [loc 603]—God covenants with the day and night (Jer 33:20)… this covenant is
based on the oath of God which binds the forces of nature by natural laws.

Now I’ve already got my antenna up because he’s put his
finger on the weakness of my model, but what he does in the second half I’m completely
unprepared for. Because if he’s right, then the necessary and logical consequences
of his assertion there doesn’t just kick over my own table, it upends everybody’s.
With a thermonuclear warhead. The result of his statement means that a covenant
is best defined as the works (or laws) which flow from a relationship. Not too different
I hear you say? That makes sense, it’s just like the rules of fidelity which defines
a husband and wife, right? Oh no my friend. Look again at what he’s proposing.

The Consequences of Van Dorns Assertion

Let’s start with the passage itself. In the covenant of
creation the relationship is: God the
creator and matter the creation.
The rules are the natural laws. Planks constant, e, pi, blackbody radiation, the
strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, fusion power, etc. These rules arethemselves covenant
God has made with our universe. Those scientific principles which define the
galaxies and keep them well ordered is the covenant which God has made.

This means that at Sinai the laws themselves compose the
covenant. An assertionwhich
I find very interesting sincethis seems
to be what Ex. 19:5 indicates. Of note also is that Sinai is not a recent
manifestation of some previous eternal covenant of works by which man does good
merit life, but a covenant in its own right. And that too is much more natural.

It means the baptists are right about the New Covenant being a new covenant. Now the people are made clean by the blood of Christ, the
requirements of a previous covenant have been fulfilled, and are made willing to keep the laws in the new covenant terms. Men are
in covenant with God by keeping His commandments, and His commandments are not
burdensome. The Apostle John calls it abiding
in Christ. Do we keep the laws to earn a seat at the table? No, Jesus has
kept the covenant regulations for us. Must we keep them to be in covenant with
God? Yes, which is whywe confess our
sins. By the laws of love we have an ongoing relationship with God. By the laws
we know His will, by the laws we can see what He wants. The law is our brother.
(Notice that I mean law as in rules for loving God, which is distinct
from the Mosaic Law given at Sinai).
Casting off God and opting for gross sin gets you booted from the covenant, by definition. Isn’t that what the
warning passages are all about?

It also means God covenants with Adam, since He gave him instructions,
and those works which flow from the relationship constitute a covenant. I do think we must be careful to
distinguish the big redemptive Covenants which typify Christ in a direct way with the
other covenants that don’t, but it’s evident Adam was under
obligation to God to perform certain duties and abstain from others, and that means covenant.

It means God has covenanted with all of us by giving us a
conscience, or the natural law. This turns out to be very similar to what the
older thinkers called the Covenant of
works but is both more robust, and more plainly limited than the old form.
Our transgression of these innate moral understandings makes us guilty before
God even if further special revelation isn’t present. Because we’ve broken the
covenant we are sinners, see Is 24:5.

It breaks down (and by that I mean completely unravels) the Covenant of works, Covenant of grace distinction
that mires the older thinkers down, but also reconciling
the thought patterns beautifully. No longer do you have to figure out which
old testament covenant belonged where, now you can accept the covenant itself, as itself, or by itself. (I don’t
think Doug himself saw the full implication of this one in forcing the reader
to define a covenant like that, since he sticks to the older forms in the book.
Nonetheless, accidental or not, his assertion delivers the deathblow to the
historic dichotomy. Atom. Bomb.)

It has the largest impact on understanding the Covenant of
Redemption in that it turns the whole thing upside down. Since a covenant is the rules which flow from the relationship,
we, interestingly enough, now necessarily have a covenant before the covenant of redemption—call this the Covenant of Identity. It means that the
Son is the Son of the Father. The Spirit is the Spirit, the person who proceeds
from them. It is who and how the members of the Trinity relate to each other. I
don’t mean to be saying something stupidly obvious like God is God, I mean that
the relationship between the persons of the God head is governed by boundaries
and rules, and that the interactions and innate nature of the persons follow
certain principles of relation.

Proceeding outward from this Covenant of Identity is the Covenant
of Redemption—but here we’d do better to call it the Covenant of Manifested Triunity. Or the Covenant
of the Revealing of God. Now it’s no longer about a plan to save the elect
by sending Christ, but the plan for the members of the Trinity to introduce
themselves to creation, so that creation could know them. It is a scheme to manifest
their attributes, persons, and nature in history to the universe, whether that
be to men, angels, animals, or even the dirt and stars. Christ still stands at
the center of the creation as He hangs on the cross, or as the women find the
tomb empty, certainly, but now we have a robust visible portion for all of them
in our definition. Previous incarnations of the Covenant of Redemption leave
little room for the Holy Spirit, but now we have ample space for all of them to
become visible. This definition of covenant leads to a much more robust
Trinitarian theology. It is the unfolding story of God, not just of His Christ.
It’s… ah… forgive me, I’m saying this badly, I know. My point is not that the
old covenant of redemption system is
wrong, so much as the Covenant of
Manifested Triunity is superior and swallows it up. It’s like how Newtonian
mechanics is now known to be a subset of general relativity, rather than in
opposition to it. By knowing Einstein you get Newton for free.

Interestingly, and I mean very interestingly, there is a side-effect of defining covenants as
the rules which proceed from relationships: it removes or dilutes the idea of
neutral ground from creation. Whereas we are tempted to think of the laws of
physics as neutral things, neither moral nor non-moral, in this scheme that
becomes more difficult. Creation existing under a covenant carries with it a
moral component by virtue of the personal God making it. Now when God creates the
heavens and the Earth He pronounces it good,
as in right by virtue of His relationship to it. Uzziah touching the ark is a
problem because he’s sinful, but because the ground or cart is morally pure
there is no problem. This means the angels who fell by disobeying their
instructions from God received a new nature by virtue of their fall. Man,
during the fall, had his heart modified, twisted, corrupted, since there’s no
escape from the moral bleeding into the physical. The moral cannot be separated
from it. That means that ordinarily to tinker with nature as given is a bad, or
immoral thing, but because God made man regent over all creation and gave him
instruction to, it’s now a good thing. I’m not sure what the further
implications of all that are, since clearly the sun is moral in a different way
than we are. But it at least is evident that by creations continual obedience
God is glorified, and that is good.

Let me answer a particular objection and then I’ll wrap it
up. In the old scheme the promise, or if you like the promises, are inherently antithetical to works. But that thinking
need no longer apply in this scheme. The covenant of promise which the new
testament speaks of in Ephesians includes the work that not just man was to do,
but chiefly what God would do. The
definition of covenant in this case is large enough to encompass it without
difficulty.

So obviously my brain is running below capacity since I’ve
been stuck on this plane for the better part of 24 hours and I feel sick and
feverish. I can feel that I’m not thinking well. And obviously I didn’t come at
this topic with as much passion or strength as I would were I defending my
position, since this is blog post was my examination of Doug’s proposal, not necessarily my view on the matter at
this point. I think however that it has a great deal going for it, and it definitely
worth further consideration. On a glance I see there’s a lot of reason to
accept it, and not very many to dismiss it. It takes what was valuable from the
older thinkers and seems to leave out their weaknesses. Granted it pulls me
very near the old model, but I think it’s much more sound.